Today a buyer whois looking to purchase real estate properties uses a real estate web site and/or works with a real estate professional to identify real estate properties of interest from ones available on the market based on search criteria such as location, price range, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, lot size, age, and so on. The prospective buyer together with the real estate professional will then visit selected real estate properties. Eventually, the buyer may make a decision to make an offer on a real estate property. A valuation appraisal is then performed. The buyer together with his financial lender will eventually decide to close the transaction if the appraised value is consonant with the seller's price.
One shortcoming of the above process is that the buyer usually selects the real estate properties he wants to visit simply based on property features, without having a sense of the financial value of each selected real estate property relative to all other real estate properties in the marketplace. (Value, in this sense, is different from the price offered by the seller.) This lack of discernment is a result of the lack of suitable valuation tools to help the buyer and his real estate professional understand the financial values of real estate properties. As a result, the buyer may fail to find better real estate properties in the marketplace, and instead may proceed with real estate properties that have lackluster financial values.